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7 Venkatesh Rao The Three Types of Decision Makers

Feb 25, 20245 min read

#7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers

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Show notes > In this episode, Venkatesh Rao, founder of Ribbonfarm and author of the book Tempo discusses the 3 types of decision-makers and shares how to adopt useful mental models
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Episode AI notes

  1. Mental mortals act as blinders on decision-makers, limiting their focus to a narrow set of information crucial for decision-making.
  2. Mindfulness and paying attention to the real world are essential to staying open to new information and preventing blind spots in decision-making.
  3. Closing off from reality can lead decision-makers to create complex interconnected internal webs of ideas that lack valuable information without constant infusion of reality data.

Snips

[22:41] Understanding the Role of Mental Mortals in Decision Making

🎧 Play snip - 1min️ (22:10 - 22:42)

✨ Summary

Mental mortals act like blinders on horses, limiting our focus to an extremely narrow stream of information and blocking out almost all pertinent reality data. Their purpose is to blind individuals to distractions, ensuring attention is directed to a specific set of information crucial for decision-making.

📚 Transcript

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Speaker 1

The easiest way to understand what mental mortals do in our thinking is they act like the blinders they put on horses. You've seen those things, right? A little side blinders that prevent the horse from looking on the sides and getting distracted. So your mental mortal's job is basically to blind you. It's to blind you to 99 point nine nine, nine, nine nine % of all the pertinent reality data that could possibly be salient to a decision, so that you're paying attention to an extremely Narrow stream of information. That's the purpose of mental morels, to blind you.

[23:55] The importance of mindfulness and paying attention to the real world

🎧 Play snip - 1min️ (22:45 - 23:51)

✨ Summary

Mindfulness and paying attention to the external world instead of getting lost in internal thoughts is crucial to staying open to changes and information. By observing the world around us, stopping the inner dialogue, and appreciating the reality outside our minds, we create opportunities for new insights and prevent ourselves from being blindsided by shifts in the world. Actively engaging with our senses and surroundings helps us maintain a connection to the real world and keeps our minds open to fresh perspectives.

📚 Transcript

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Speaker 2

Then the problemis, if the world is shifted or changed, then you're blind to that change, n exactly. And you have to hope that that change happens lead through one of the cracks you've left open and to so does that go to information processing, when you think about it and how we filter And how we process, how do how do you leave those cracks open in your life?

Speaker 1

I'll give you a short answer and a long one. The short answer is a basically mindfulness, just paying attention to the world itself, which has shut down the inner dialogue. And well, look at the world. Look outside your window right now, dos magnolia tree that's about to flower outside my window where i'm sitting here. So the real world is actually, this may sound like stating e obvious, but it actually needs to be stated, and people need to repeat this to themselvesfrequently, that there is, in fact, A real world out there that you can stop and pause and actually take a look at. It's not all abstract categories inside your head. There's a any time you just pay attent to what your eyes are seeing or your ears are hearing, that's a how you sort of make sure the cracks stay open.

[26:55] Interconnected Internal Realities

🎧 Play snip - 1min️ (25:54 - 26:57)

✨ Summary

Closing your eyes to reality can lead to creating complex and interconnected internal webs of ideas based on existing information. This process can become addictive, forming a snowball effect of connecting unrelated concepts. However, without constant infusion of reality data, these interconnections lack substance and fail to contain valuable information.

📚 Transcript

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Speaker 1

But the other thing that can happen is it can get more and more interconnected internally. That's what happens when you close your eyes to reality. Data, information that's already inside your head, has a tendency to sort of get wired up in more and more complex ways. And people love that. It's an addictive process. It's like, oh, this idea from the bible is actually esimilar to quantu mechanics, and therefore a quantu mechanics was predicted by the bible. That sort of a process for of snowball. And your head becomes full of this richly interconnected web of ideas. But the basis for the interconnection isa blindness. I mean, it's not supported by more reality data. It's, it is like three objects and you've tried to connect them up. There's three different ways to do it. If there's four objects in your head, there's six different ways connect them. I its almost o brute force kind of approaty. But the sort of cautionarytail here is, if you don't have constant reality data coming, i into your mental model, you'll make all possible connections, and they won't actually contain Any information. They'll just be connections.

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